A poser wearing RM Williams boots is having them polished in Lafayette Square, New Orleans. He is particularly chuffed by the shoe-shine man's attention, praise of the boots, the smiles of approval of nearby loungers, and the comments on his “cool” accent.
Having warmed up his target with flattery, the shoe-shine man then says, “I'll bet you $100 that I can tell you where you got them boots.”
The poser replies in his laid-on-thick Australian affectation, “OK mate, you're on, tell me.”
The shoe-shine man replies, “You got them boots on right here in Lafayette Square. New Orleans”, and three mean-looking loungers approach to ensure that the shoe-shine man collects the $100, plus the cost of the shoe-shine service.
END OF JOKE – Now some off-forum waffle on language that might interest a few readers
The burble that follows is a didactic response to comments made by Picksel, and which I make as an indulgence, because words and language-related things interest me.
I was aware that the Classical Greek word “kakos” meant bad, and other similar words, but the Greek word too has an etymology that goes further back in history. Its etymology is suggested to be the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root "kakka" (to defecate), but this is not certain. I am inclined to accept that etymology, but as this is a humour subforum, I did no toriginally dwell on its uncertainty, and it suited my purpose in that post to link it to the Afrikaans word “kak”. That “kakos” means so many negative things in Modern Greek, or Classical Greek, hints at a metaphorical use of a basic word, just as the colloquialisms “shitty” and “crappy” have arisen in English as colloquial adjectives that have many synonyms, depending on the noun that they qualifies.
I was also aware that the two usual turd-related prefixes are “copro” and “scato”, and hence “copromancy” and “scatomancy” both mean divining by examining turds – a bit like Technical Analysis seems to some stock-market investors.
Word meanings change, and sometimes a newer meaning is close to being the opposite of the older word. The word “terrific” is shifting to mean “good” – virtually its opposite meaning. Some years ago, I was amused by a boy referring to a bonfire as being “cool”. Also, the archaic word “wither”, meaning “against”, morphed into “with”, so “withhold”, “without”, “withstand”, and "withdraw" still use the prefix “with” to mean “against”, whereas “with” on its own comes close to meaning the opposite of “against”. The sentence, “I fought with him.” is ambiguous, but not necessarily wrong – e.g., in respect to a domestic tiff, one would use “fought with the wife”, and not “fought against the wife.”
The word “be” and the word “utan” meaning “out” became “buton” or “butan” in Old English, “buiten” in Dutch, and “buite” in Afrikaans, although in both Dutch and Afrikaans its usage is much narrower than in English, and zonder (in Dutch) and sonder (in Afrikaans) are used to mean not having the use, happening or presence of something. “Buton” or “butan” morphed into “but” in Early Middle English, but it retained the wider meaning of “without” found in English, so in the Early Middle English song that has the words, “He that schytyth wyth hys hoyll, but he wyppe hys ars clen”, the underlined word “but” means “without”, so the second set of words mean the opposite of similar words used today. In Modern English “but” still means “without” in phrases like, “But by the grace of God” or, “All, but Fred”. Even the sentence, “He all but drowned.” means that he went through a drowning situation, without drowning. All these examples of “but” meaning “without” would require the word “sonder” in Afrikaans, and not “buite”.
